kenshoto

Kenshoto, organizer of the official Defcon Capture the Flag contest for the last four years, has stepped down from the position, and thus Defcon is looking for a new organizer for the event. If you’re highly competent, and maybe a little crazy, this might be your chance to step in and run one of the most well-known and prestigious hacking contests in the world. Please understand that the staff is looking for someone who wants to take ownership of the contest and make something new, unique, and challenging, and that Kenshoto has left extremely huge shoes to fill. Merely offering to replicate the existing contest and keep things mostly unchanged isn’t going to cut it.

If you’re up to the challenge, check out Dark Tangent’s post on the Defcon forums (which, for some odd reason, sounds strikingly like his 2005 post calling for a CTF organizer), where he comprehensively lays out what the staff is looking for in a new event organizer. If it jives well with you, get in touch with the Defcon staff, and maybe we’ll be covering your contest later this year.

Kenshoto held qualifiers for the DefCon‘s Capture the Flag competition last weekend. The top seven finishers: Routards, Pandas with Gambas, Guard@MyLan0, Shellphish, Taekwon-V, WOWHACKER, PLUS, and last year’s winners, 1@stPlace, will be invited to participate in the final this August in Las Vegas.

The qualification started Friday night at 10PM EDT with an email (Subject: M0rt4g3 y0ur /14gr4 up 2 3 1nch3$) being sent to all 451 registered teams. Connecting to the game server displayed a Jeopardy style score board. The five available categories were Binary Leetness, Forensics, Real World, Potent Pwnables, and Trivia, with point values from 100 to 500. Only one question was opened to start. The first team to answer that was allowed to select the next question to open and then any team could try to answer it. Participants were warned about the difficulty of the 500 level questions and the entire Real World category. At the end of everything, four questions still remained locked at the end.

Kenshoto is back again to run the Capture the Flag competition at DefCon. CTF is a multiteam competition featuring creative attack and defense of servers and lasts the entirety of DefCon. Unreleased exploits are often seen during the competition. As in previous years, Kenshoto will be narrowing the field with a qualification round. Quals will start the evening of May 30th and run for 48 hours. NOPS-R-US has a solution guide for the previous two years so you can get some idea of what you’re getting yourself into. They’ve even got a couple write ups for last year’s final. The competition should prove entertaining even if you don’t make the final cut.